Terminal

How to spell terminal

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce terminal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does terminal mean?

1. nounA building or point where journeys begin and end, such as at an airport, bus station, or port.
2. adjectiveSituated at or forming the end, or describing an illness that will end in death.
3. nounA device or connection point at the end of a line, such as a computer screen and keyboard or an electrical contact.

Terminal in a sentence

• noun

  The flight departs from the international terminal at noon.

• adjective

  The terminal station on the line sits right beside the harbour.

• noun

  She typed the command into the terminal to restart the server.

• noun

  Buses to the coast leave from the southern terminal every hour.

• adjective

  After years of decline the factory entered a terminal phase and finally closed.

• noun

  Connect the red wire to the positive terminal on the battery.

Where does terminal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin terminalis, meaning 'relating to a boundary or end', which was formed from terminus, a noun that literally meant a boundary marker, a limit, or the post set up to show where one piece of land ended and another began. The Romans even worshipped a minor god named Terminus who guarded these boundary stones, so the sense of a firm, final edge runs very deep in the word. English picked it up in the 1400s as an adjective describing something situated at the end, and by the 1800s it had grown into a noun for the end point of a railway or bus route, and later for the end of any line in computing and electrical work. The grim medical sense, an illness that is going to end in death, draws on exactly the same idea of a final limit. The everyday relatives 'terminate', 'term', and 'determine' all share the same termin- root, which is a handy reminder that the spelling keeps that single 'n' and ends in -al, not -ole.

How the word is built

• termin- (from Latin terminus: boundary, limit, end)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)